August 2009

A study released by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) shows that native-born Americans fill the majority of jobs in almost every field. According to the CIS, this debunks the idea that immigrants are required to do jobs that Americans would refuse.

The study — titled “Jobs Americans Don’t Do?” — found that only four occupations in the United States employ a majority immigrant workforce. The findings also showed that a vast majority of occupations, including many low-skill jobs, are filled mostly by native-born Americans. “It looks like pretty much every job, including the worst paying, the toughest jobs you can think of, are done, typically overwhelmingly, by Americans — even jobs that you might think are overwhelmingly done by foreign-born people,” said Steven Camarota, director of research for the organization. “The only occupational categories which were found to have majority-immigrant workforces were “plasterers and stucco masons” (56 percent immigrant), “graders and sorters, agricultural products” (54 percent), “misc. personal appearance workers” (53 percent), and “tailors, dressmakers and sewers” (51 percent).

In addition, two occupational categories were found to have workforces that were exactly 50 percent immigrant: “miscellaneous agricultural workers, including animal breeders,” and “sewing machine operators.”

In addition to this study, CIS simultaneously released another study, titled “Worse Than It Seems,” which analyzed unemployment and underemployment rates among both immigrants and native-born Americans. “America appears to have an over-supply, and over-abundance of less educated workers,” Camarota told CNSNews.com. “Not only are so many ‘not working,’ but the share ‘not working’ has been going up for 30 years, and wages for such workers have either stagnated in real terms or actually declined very significantly,” he added.

The study found that immigrants, native-born Americans, and the total population all have a 9.7 rate of unemployment. However, native born Hispanic Americans have a 13.3. percent rate of unemployment, and African-Americans suffer 15.8 percent unemployment. By comparison, Hispanic immigrants have only an 11.1 percent unemployment rate – higher than the national average but less than native born Hispanics. “The overall trend is clear,” he added, “less educated Americans work less and less, and they generally make less and less than they used to.”

Other findings from the studies:

— There are 93 occupations in which 20 percent or more of workers are immigrants. These high-immigrant occupations are primarily, but not exclusively, lower-wage jobs that require relatively little formal education.

— More than 23.5 million native-born Americans work in high-immigrant occupations (occupations 20 percent or more immigrant.) These occupations include 19 percent of all native workers.

— Most native-born Americas do not face significant job competition from immigrants, the report noted, however, those who do “tend to be less-educated and poorer than those who face relatively little competition from immigrants.”

— In high-immigrant occupations, 57 percent of native-born workers have no more than a high school education. In occupations that are less than 20 percent immigrant, 35 percent of natives have no more than a high school education. And in occupations made up of less than 10 percent immigrant, only 26 percent of native-born workers have no more than a high school education.

— The average wage or salary for native-born Americans in high-immigrant occupations is one-quarter lower than in occupations that are less than 20 percent immigrant.

The study also found that 44 percent of medical scientists are immigrants, as are 34 percent of software engineers, 27 percent of physicians, and 25 percent of chemists. The report also noted that only 10 percent of reporters are immigrants, as are 6 percent of lawyers and judges and 3 percent of farmers and ranchers.

Calls for comment from several immigrant-rights groups were not returned.

There is always a moral asymmetry between the free West and its enemies. The West is meant to play by the rules, and it usually does. It seeks to conduct it affairs within a moral framework, and certain things are simply off limits. But the enemies of freedom and democracy know no such compunctions. They are quite happy to use any means, including the exploitation of freedoms in the West, for their own purposes.

A classic case of this occurred during the Cold War. The Communists were quite adept at using the benefits and freedoms of the West to undermine it. Marxist morality dictated that the end justifies any means. Thus anything was permissible in the war against the West.

Islamic jihadists likewise seek to use and abuse the Western system for its own ends. They are happy to exploit Western freedoms, tolerance and openness to achieve their aims of a global caliphate and the submission of everyone to sharia law.

One way they seek to do this is by exploiting Western immigration laws and procedures. The West, ever keen to appear to be tolerant, compassionate and inclusive, is quite willing to allow Muslims of all stripes into their lands. Now the majority of these Muslims are usually not too problematic. But a healthy minority are. Radical Islamists are using our openness and porous borders to enter our lands, only with the aim of overthrowing the West from within.

Consider a case making headlines in today’s press. Here is one how news report covers the story: “A follower of a radical Islamic movement that seeks to introduce sharia law and has been linked to terrorist groups is being granted asylum in Australia. The Refugee Review Tribunal has recommended a protection visa for an Egyptian man, who is a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic political group with links to al-Qaida. The Muslim Brotherhood has been outlawed in several countries, including Egypt. It seeks to establish a pan-Islamic state ruled by sharia law and is committed to the destruction of Israel.”

A spokesperson for the Australia-Israel Jewish Affairs Council, expressed these concerns: “The Muslim Brotherhood has been banned in many countries for good reason. It’s not just its attitude towards Israel that’s of concern. It has strands that are very sympathetic towards terrorism.” The Federal opposition immigration spokeswoman said she would write to the Government, asking to have the decision overturned.

If this were just an isolated incident, a one-off event, then not much more should be said. But if this is part of a much bigger picture, and just one example of a recurring pattern, then we should all be very concerned indeed. And that in fact seems to be the case. In fact, it is the very point being made in several new books.

For example, Sam Solomon and Elias Al Maqdisi make this case in Modern Day Trojan Horse: The Islamic Doctrine of Immigration. Both authors are experts on Islamic thought, but Solomon is especially crucial here, since he used to be a professor of sharia law, but has since converted to Christianity.

The pair examine how a small presence of Muslims in a Western nation eventually builds to a critical mass, with the eventual aim of implementing sharia law, and taking over the host culture. Even seemingly benign measures, such as the building of mosques, can be used for these greater purposes.

Indeed, an earlier volume by the same two authors argued how important the mosque in Western nations is to this overall process. In The Mosque Exposed, they highlight how the Islamists use the mosque to teach, foment and recruit for violent jihad.

In their newer book they document how Western immigration policies are being exploited by these radicals, and how they use such things as taquiya, or deception, to achieve these aims. They seek to hide behind religious devotion and practice as they attempt to wrest control of lands belonging to the kuffar (non-Muslim).

The slow but steady process of Islamisation of Western lands is taking place in many areas, with any attempts to impede this progress met with shouts of discrimination and Islamophobia. And the West is so concerned about not treading on anyone’s toes, that the radicals are making great gains in realising their goals.

Other new books also describe this process. For example, Christopher Caldwell’s new book, Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, examines how changing demographic patterns in the West, especially Europe, are part and parcel of this greater strategy of Islamic hegemony.

Caldwell documents how Western governments are squeamish about appearing to be intolerant or unwelcoming, so they often become their own worst enemies, by allowing the detractors of the West to freely enter their lands, set up shop, and work out their long-term plans.

He documents how the West tends to encourage the ghetto-isation of Muslim arrivals, instead of aiming for their assimilation and integration. This is a recipe for disaster, and we have seen it played out numerous times, especially in major European cities.

Other recent books might be cited, but the message should be clear. Just as Lenin once quipped about how the West would sell the Communists the rope with which to hang itself, so too modern democracies are sowing the seeds of their own destruction, by being naive or ignorant about global jihad, and how the radicals are using the West and its freedoms to in fact bring it to its knees.

To raise these issues is of course not to accuse all Muslims of treachery, jihad and anti-Western crusades. But a clear minority at least of Muslims are using the privileges and benefits of the West to promote Islamic jihad, and bring about the destruction of the West. Vigilance, as always, is clearly the order of the day here. Example here

The 18th such boat this year — compared with none or close to none in the final years of the conservative government. The flow started as soon as the Leftist government watered down the laws designed to stop such arrivals

An Australian naval ship on Saturday intercepted a boatload of suspected asylum seekers, a government minister said, the latest in a wave of arrivals that has stoked fears of weak border security.

The boat was stopped near Ashmore Island off Australia’s northern coast, Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor said in a statement. An initial count showed 55 people on board including three crew. Their nationalities were not known.

Border protection is a hot political issue in Australia. Critics blame a new rise in people-smuggling this year on a softer stance on the issue by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, compared to the conservative government he ousted in 2007.

“The group will be transferred to Christmas Island where they will undergo security, identity and health checks as well as establish their reasons for travel,” O’Connor said, referring to the latest arrivals.

Australia has a processing center for suspected asylum-seekers on Christmas Island, an Indian Ocean possession just south of the Indonesian island of Java.

Many of the people-smugglers are thought to be based in Indonesia, although the asylum seekers are generally from war-ravaged countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Sri Lanka.

The U.S. District Court in Maryland ruled in favor of an executive order first issued during the Bush Administration that would require all federal government contractors to use E-Verify. The order was delayed once by Pres. Bush and three times by Pres. Obama while they were awaiting the outcome of lawsuits filed by various business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Under the court’s ruling, all federal contractors holding contracts of more than $100,000, regardless of size, will be required to use E-Verify, beginning on Sept. 8. Subcontractors will also be subject to the rule if their portion of the contract is more than $3,000. The court rejected all arguments presented by the plaintiffs.

Judge Alexander Williams, Jr. wrote that “the decision to be a government contractor is voluntary” and “no one has a right to be a government contractor.”

Last month, the Department of Homeland Security agreed to implement the rule, and it’s been backed by the Senate. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) offered an amendment that was adopted to the Homeland Security spending bill that would require all federal contractors to E-Verify on new hires. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) offered another amendment that was also adopted to the same bill that would require federal contractors to use E-Verify on all existing employees as well. Both amendments, however, must make it through a conference committee in the fall that will rectify the differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill.

After the court’s ruling, U.S. Chamber of Commerce official Robin Conrad said that the Chamber is obviously disappointed with the decision.

“Our concern is the practical impact on employers … employers will be required to reverify existing employees who work on federal contracts, which has the potential to impact hundreds of thousands of workers.”

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) applauded the court’s decision.

“There are more than 12 million citizens and legal immigrants unemployed, and even higher-than-average unemployment rates among blacks and U.S.-born Hispanics. It would be wrong to allow jobs that should go to them to go to illegal immigrants instead. I am hopeful that the Chamber will choose not to appeal this decision. The Chamber should stand up for American workers and encourage all its member businesses to enroll in E-Verify.”

But only when it suits them, of course. They overlook the fact that respect for law depends on it being enforced — and enforced impartially. With law enforcement as arbitrary as they want, there would be as much respect for law in America as there is in Mexico — and we can see any day the chaos and poverty resulting from that

A coalition of Latino groups, liberal activists and labor unions have written President Barack Obama asking him to scrap agreements between the federal government and local police departments that allow them arrest illegal immigrants.

The groups — which include the American Civil Liberties Union, National Council of La Raza and United Methodist Church — asked Obama to nix 287(g) agreements with local law enforcement agencies. That includes an agreement with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has used that authority to raid businesses suspected of employing undocumented workers, make arrests and pick up suspected illegal immigrants on crime sweeps.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said earlier this summer the Obama administration plans to rework the 287(g) agreements to focus on picking up fugitive criminals. Arpaio argues that change would weaken their effectiveness.

The ACLU and other critics say the sheriff uses the power to unfairly target and arrest Hispanics, which takes away resources from other policing arenas. The ACLU filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office of racial profiling.

Other groups signing the letter include the National Immigration Law Center, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Service Employees International Union, Code Pink Arizona, the Anti-Defamation League, Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, National Center for Lesbian Rights, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Unitarian Universalist churches and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

The San Francisco-based Ella Baker Center was founded by [black Marxist] Van Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Fox News Commentator Glenn Beck has criticized Jones far-left political views.

An immigrant baby boom is fuelling Britain’s fastest population growth in half a century. The number of people in the UK has passed 61million for the first time, figures showed yesterday. Record immigration levels over the past decade have driven up the number of women of childbearing age. This helped boost the number of births last year to 791,000 – up 33,000 on 2007.

For the first time in a decade, the excess of births over deaths played a bigger role than immigration itself in driving population growth, which is now twice as fast as in the 1990s. The figures from the Office for National Statistics show that net immigration – the balance of those arriving over those leaving – fell by 44 per cent between 2007 and 2008 as economic turmoil triggered an exodus of foreign workers.

Immigration Minister Phil Woolas seized on those figures as proof that Britain’s borders were ‘stronger than ever’ and migration was ‘under control’. He insisted that previous projections showing the UK population rising to 70million within 30 years were now ‘not true’.

Opposition critics and immigration campaigners reacted with incredulity, pointing out that immigration remains at near-record levels and it is foreign-born mothers who are pushing up the birth rate.

Last month Home Secretary Alan Johnson ruled out any cap on immigration and told MPs he did not ‘lie awake at night worrying about a population of 70million.’

Shadow Immigration Minister Damian Green said last night: ‘Alan Johnson says he doesn’t lose sleep over population growth. Perhaps he should, instead of sleeping on the job. ‘These figures show our population is still rising fast, even when the recession is driving hundreds of thousands to leave. ‘This puts added pressure on housing and transport, and shows that there is still no proper control over immigration.’

The ONS figures showed 61,383,000 people living in the UK in mid-2008. The figure has leapt by two million – equivalent to a city twice the size of Birmingham – in just seven years. The increase of 408,000 in the 12 months from mid-2007 was the steepest since the baby boom years of the early 1960s. It represented an annual increase of 0.7 per cent – more than twice as fast as in the 1990s and three times the rate of the 1980s. Birth rates have been rising over the past decade, with the ONS measure of fertility now standing at 1.96 children per woman, up from 1.63 in 2001 and the highest in almost 40 years.

ONS statisticians said the rising birth rate was partly due to women born in the UK having more children. While there was ‘no single explanation’ for this, possible causes included women in their 20s choosing to have babies slightly earlier and changes in government policies on maternity leave and tax credits. However mass immigration has had a greater impact on birth rates, as hundreds of thousands of women of childbearing age have arrived in the UK. They have boosted the number of potential mothers by two per cent since 2001. Foreign-born women also have a higher birth rate – 2.51 children compared with 1.86 for UK-born women.

ONS statistician Roma Chappell said 56 per cent of the 33,000 increase in births between 2007 and 2008 was accounted for by the babies of mothers born outside the UK. Some of these, however, will be of British descent. Across Britain around one baby in four is now born to a mother from overseas. In London, the figure rises to 55 per cent, with the highest proportions last year in the boroughs of Newham (75 per cent) and Brent (73 per cent).

Slight falls in the death rate over recent years mean that ‘natural’ population growth – the excess of births over deaths – reached 220,000 in 2007/08. Net immigration added 186,000 – down from 198,000 the year before.

Earlier this week, separate health figures showed maternity services under severe pressure. Some 4,000 women were forced to give birth outside maternity wards last year due to a lack of midwives and beds.

While the births figure is rising, numbers at the other end of the age scale are also growing. There are now 1.3million people aged 85 or over – more than two per cent of the population.

The ONS immigration statistics for the year to December 2008 showed 512,000 arrivals, down only slightly on the 527,000 figure of the previous year. But there was a sharp rise in the number of foreign workers leaving the UK. A total of 395,000 people emigrated, up 24 per cent on the year before. They included 237,000 non-Britons, many of them Poles and other Eastern Europeans.

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the MigrationWatch think-tank said last night: ‘It is the usual Government spin to claim these numbers as a success for immigration policy when foreign immigration is virtually unchanged at about half a million a year. ‘What has really happened is that EU citizens have voted with their feet. The number leaving has doubled in the face of the deep recession in Britain. But EU migration is something over which the Government have no control whatever. ‘The bottom line is that the population of the UK will exceed 70million within 25 years even at these levels of immigration.’

The number of Eastern European workers returning home is now nearly as large as the numbers arriving. Figures show that last year the total number of ‘A8’ citizens coming to Britain from the former Eastern Bloc states slumped by more than a quarter from 109,000 to 79,000. At the same time the number returning to their homelands more than doubled, from 25,000 to 66,000. The trend helped drive down net immigration to 118,000, a drop of 44 per cent and the lowest since the expansion of the EU five years ago.

Karen Dunnell, the Government’s chief statistician, said the figures were likely to be due to the economic downturn. She said: ‘You have to say that probably unemployment and the economic situation, given that quite a lot from the A8 countries are coming to work, is probably having an impact.’ An estimated one million people have flocked to the UK since Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the EU in 2004. The Government faced fierce criticism at the time for opting to give all new EU citizens free access to UK labour markets, while other major economies imposed strict curbs.

The U.K. population grew at a faster-than-average pace last year as the highest birth rate since 1973 offset a slowdown in the number of foreigners arriving. The population rose 0.7 percent to 61.4 million in the middle of 2008, more than the 0.5 percent annual average since 2001, the Office for National Statistics said. Migrant numbers grew by 561,000, down from a record 605,000 in 2007.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has implemented the biggest clampdown on immigration since World War II after record numbers arrived following the eastward expansion of the European Union in 2004. Arrivals from the eight accession countries dropped 28 percent, and departures of those nationals more than doubled. “Britain’s borders are stronger than ever before,” Immigration Minister Phil Woolas said in a statement in London today. “Immigration is under control.” [What a liar! It’s ILLEGAL immigration that is Britain’s problem and just the ones they have caught and told to go home (but who nonetheless are staying on) number half a million. Woollybutt is of his father the Devil, for there is no truth in him (John 8:44)]

Woolas has introduced an Australian-style points system for granting visas and raised restrictions on work permits and marriages to curb immigration from outside the EU. The report also shows the Home Office removed fewer illegal immigrants and granted 4 percent more asylum claims in the second quarter compared with a year ago.

Conservative View

“The figures show our population is still rising fast, even when the recession is driving hundreds of thousands of people to leave,” said Damian Green, a lawmaker from the Conservative opposition who speaks on domestic affairs. “This puts added pressure on housing and transport and shows there is still no proper control over immigration numbers.”

Today’s figures mark the first time a decade that the so- called natural rate of population growth, including births and deaths, outstripped the impact of immigration. The statistics office wasn’t able to say how much of the drop in immigration from the so-called A8 countries was due to the recession. “Quite a lot of people from the A8 countries are coming specifically to work,” Roma Chappell, a government statistician, said at a press conference. “The unemployment and the economic situation there is probably having an impact, but it’s very difficult to prove it.”

The population grew by a total of 408,000 in the past year. Natural change contributed to an increase of 220,000, the most since at least 1992, the report said. Net immigration into the U.K. fell to 186,000, the lowest in four years.

Fertility Rising

The fertility rate, a measure how many children a woman can expect to bear, touched 1.96, the highest since 1973. Also, the number of women of child-bearing age rose, mostly due to an increase in foreign-born women living in the country.

Bank of England policy makers have been watching those figures to assess spare capacity in Britain’s labor market. As the economy tipped into its worst recession in a generation and unemployment rose, the number of migrants departing the U.K. increased, the data released today showed. “Unemployment may not be rising as quickly as we would have thought because workers who lose their jobs may be leaving the country,” said David Tinsley, an economist at National Australia Bank in London and a former central bank official. “The degree of excess capacity in the economy is probably not as great as it would be.”

Background

The "line" of this blog is that immigration should be SELECTIVE. That means that:

1). A national government should be in control of it. The U.S. and U.K. governments are not but the Australian government has shown that the government of a prosperous Western country can be. Up until its loss of office in 2007, the conservative Howard government had all but eliminated illegal immigration. The present Leftist government has however restarted the flow of illegals by repealing many of the Howard government regulations.

2). Selectivity should be based on "the content of a man's character, not on the color of his skin", as MLK said. To expand that a little: Immigrants should only be accepted if they as individuals seem likely to make a positive net contribution to the country. Many "refugees" would fail that test: Muslims and Africans particularly. Educational level should usually be a pretty fair proxy for the individual's likely value to the receiving country. There will, of course, be exceptions but it is nonetheless unlikely that a person who has not successfully completed High School will make a net positive contribution to a modern Western society.

3). Immigrants should be neither barred NOR ACCEPTED solely because they are of some particular ethnic origin. Blacks are vastly more likely to be criminal than are whites or Chinese, for instance, but some whites and some Chinese are criminal. It is the criminality that should matter, not the race.

4). The above ideas are not particularly blue-sky. They roughly describe the policies of the country where I live -- Australia. I am critical of Australian policy only insofar as the "refugee" category for admission is concerned. All governments have tended to admit as refugees many undesirables. It seems to me that more should be required of them before refugees are admitted -- for instance a higher level of education or a business background.

5). Perhaps the most amusing assertion in the immigration debate is that high-income countries like the USA and Britain NEED illegal immigrants to do low-paid menial work. "Who will pick our crops?" (etc.) is the cry. How odd it is then that Australians get all the normal services of a modern economy WITHOUT illegal immigrants! Yes: You usually CAN buy a lettuce in Australia for a dollar or thereabouts. And Australia IS a major exporter of primary products.

6). I am a libertarian conservative so I reject the "open door" policy favoured by many libertarians and many Leftists. Both those groups tend to have a love of simplistic generalizations that fail to deal with the complexity of the real world. It seems to me that if a person has the right to say whom he/she will have living with him/her in his/her own house, so a nation has the right to admit to living among them only those individuals whom they choose.

I can be reached on jonjayray@hotmail.com -- or leave a comment on any post. Abusive comments will be deleted.